Did You Know? You can Use a Web Crawler for…

Did You Know? You can Use a Web Crawler for…

Web crawlers, or bots, as some people like to call it, has been around for more than a decade now. It is only recently that the power of such web crawlers has been highlighted. Today, a majority of the content and information is derived from the Internet. TV and radio viewership is going down and […]

Web crawlers, or bots, as some people like to call it, has been around for more than a decade now. It is only recently that the power of such web crawlers has been highlighted. Today, a majority of the content and information is derived from the Internet. TV and radio viewership is going down and broadband and internet penetration is rising rapidly. With the amount of information available on the internet, companies have realized the importance of insightful data for business growth. Many people only identify web crawlers as a tool used by Google to index all pages on the web to return the relevant result. However, web crawlers and data extraction technologies can be put to use in different industries to gather meaningful insights.

Automatic site maintenance

Depending on the freshness of content, Google sends crawlers to your website on a periodic interval. However, the site may go through design, system, or layout changes from time-to-time. Instead of Google, running a web crawler through the website can help identify all blocks and navigational errors on the site. It is essential for some businesses that depend on fluently running websites to make money. Sending out crawlers to the website can show if all the links and nodes are working.

Check freshness of websites

Web crawlers can constantly check relevant web pages and build simple indexes out of them. This way, it is possible to check the freshness of the website and content of all hosts and their services frequently. This is a good indicator to know which links need to be changed or promoted in order to rank higher in search engines.

Monitoring news and social media

People talk a lot about your brand in the social media. Also, news and media houses can frequently cover your company time and again. It may be impossible to keep track of all such mentions. It is important for a company to respond to such mentions whether it be positive or negative. Companies can turn towards web crawling to monitor social media sites, news sites, and industry forums to know what is being talked about them. Such an information is invaluable to the marketing team to either activate damage limitations or acknowledge positive comments.

Competition tracking

Going to your competitor’s site and finding relevant information on new products and services is a tedious task. It’s also old school, which doesn’t utilize the level of technology available today. A web crawler can grab that information with ease so that the marketing team can concentrate on analyzing the data rather than spending days gathering data. Web crawling makes competition tracking easier, and in this age, if you don’t know about your competition, the business is bound to suffer.

Dynamic ticket pricing

Online ticketing systems are complex, and all airlines follow dynamic pricing. The prices are bound to change every time you refresh your screen, and the changes are vivid when the prices of all airlines are aggregated. Web crawling can get dynamic pricing from multiple platforms, which makes it easier to identify tickets with lower prices. Using such tools enables service providers to create a platform for better pricing, seat plans, and availability.

To know more about uses of web crawling, data mining, and advanced analytics: